Bitcoin Forum

Your auction will probably not receive any bids if:

• Your starting bid is very high. (More than half the value of said item.)
• You have a reserve set.(People don't like wasting their time. Reserves almost NEVER work.)
• The first part of the description is in a foreign language.

I just want to get this out there because right now it seems the current auction IQ is very low. With the current prices I am seeing there is very little incentive for anyone to bid, unless they need said item right then and there (very rare).

Live long and prosper.

hi i just registered and tried to list my olive oil, sadly i couldn't find a suitable category! maybe u add consumables/food etc ?

Well, here's the thing.  I put a new Dell Streak 7 tablet up starting at 0.99 BTC, no reserve, high bidder gets it.  Same thing I usually do on ebay.  Well there are so few users /bidders on BiddingPond that it sold for $20 BTC.  Great for the buyer, not so hot for me.

I'm not giving up on it yet though.  I should perhaps start with some cheaper items.

You could use higher bid increments.

A low start price (1 btc) plus a reasonable reserve is a way to try to sell a valuable item on biddingpond.  People DO bid on reserve auctions, but not as much as reserve free auctions.  Unfortunately people often set the reserve too high as well. 

reserves are bullshit, and an insult to bidders.  "come on little ones - your bid is worthless, but you can do it!  oops!  your bid is real now - better retract it..."

man up.  if there's a price below which you are not willing to sell, then that should be your starting bid.

i've been a successful book dealer on eBay since very shortly after its beginning.  i've never offered an item with a reserve.

and i've never bid on one, either.

When I've sold stuff on BiddingPond, it's basically with the thought that there is probably at most one person visiting the site who is interested in it (just because the community isn't the size of eBay yet). I either list a short auction (3 days) with the starting bid as what I want to sell it for, or I list a long auction (1 month) with a Buy It Now Only price of what I want to sell it for, and really they're pretty much the same as far as I can see, since I'm likely to get 1 bid at most. And if it doesn't sell, that's fine too, since all I'm trying to do is either get rid of some old stuff lying around the house, or just outright buying Bitcoins in a roundabout way (by selling Paypal USD or US postage stamps). I see it as more of a list-items-for-sale-for-bitcoins site than an auction site right now, but as the Bitcoin community gets bigger I hope that it does become more of an auction site so that we can start to find the true value of bitcoins.